Gartner

Gideon Gartner founded the firm in 1979 in Stamford, Connecticut, to sell independent analysis of the IT market to companies buying mainframes who didn't want to rely on the vendor's own numbers. Two pictures made it famous well beyond the boardroom. The Magic Quadrant sorts vendors into four boxes, with the top right meaning "leader". The Hype Cycle, developed by analyst Jackie Fenn in the 1990s, describes how a technology climbs a peak of inflated expectations and drops into a trough of disillusionment before becoming useful.

Vendors quote their placement in press releases, and critics point out that the same vendors are also clients. Gartner coining terms like SASE shows how much a market lets itself be shaped by whoever draws the map.